Among the Living (2 page)

It got a big laugh.

A woman stood at the bar along the far wall under a Ruscha, her face turned away, quarter profile, talking with someone, maybe watching herself in the plateglass window beyond the man. There was something Old School about her look, too, black hair over the eyes, a silk dress that caught the light, shoes taller than they needed to be. In another time, or at least another
movie,
she would have had a cigarette smoldering and a little chrome .25 automatic in her clutch bag. And a hurt in her heart.

Jimmy was watching her when Joel Kinser came up.

“Maybe I could see some I.D.,” the host said.

Kinser was just over five feet. He wore a suit the color of raw clay, a black silken V-neck tee underneath, thin-soled slip-ons, no socks, a belt that picked up the hardware on the tops of the shoes. He had his hands in his pants pockets, pockets which were always empty. He hated bulges.

“Look who’s talking,” Jimmy said. “It takes an I.Q. of one-twenty to get into Mensa. What’d you do, have one of your story editors take the test for you?”

Joel Kinser loved talking about how very intelligent he was. It was almost his favorite subject. He smiled in an oddly feminine way.

“Don’t hate me because I’m perspicacious,” he said.

Jimmy couldn’t look away from the beauty.

“Who’s she?”

“Jean Kantke. Go talk to her. We don’t bite.”

“Oh, I could never
talk
to one of you.”

“Funny.”

“What would I
say
?”

“Right.”

A television star, a comic, came in from the foyer, even later to the do than Jimmy. He stopped on the steps, looking for Kinser, or making an entrance, letting them all get a good look at him. He had a face that made you smile or at least think of smiling. He had a can of beer in his hand and wore a black Hugo Boss suit over a Day-Glo Dale Earnhardt Jr. T-shirt.

“
He’s
not Mensa is he?” Jimmy said.

“Just a friend. Like you, Jimmy.” Kinser turned up the wattage in his smile and started toward the comic.

“Have fun,” he looked back and said. “And, by the way, it’s one thirty-two.”

Jimmy went over to the bar, stepped behind it, poured out the martini and started making a shaker of something of his own. The black-haired beauty, Jean Kantke, was still there, alone now, her back to him.

Jimmy said, “Just as I pulled up, this great song started on the radio. I was going to hang a U-ey, keep on going. You ever do that?”

She turned. From across the room, she was pretty. From here, she was stunning. She brushed her hair away from her face. Up close, her black hair had a blue shine to it. She had green eyes, a bit sad. Her lipstick was some shade of fifties red, edged in black in a way you couldn’t exactly see when you looked for it. Her arms were bare. And long. She laid a hand on the bar, struck a pose, but with her it looked natural. A line of little pink pearls followed each other around her pretty wrist.

As he took her in, in that long second, Jimmy had a thought he’d never say aloud, how a beautiful woman was like a classic car, the bold lines, the unexpected color, the
speed
of it, standing still. And the sense that its time was gone already, even as you stood there in front of it.

“I guess not,” he said.

“I might,” she said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not the radio type.”

“What was the song?” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

She was drinking a martini, too. Jimmy took her glass, dumped it, poured her one from whatever he’d made in the pitcher and one for himself. It was pink. He dropped a thin green curve of lime peel onto the surface, like a professional, or an actor playing a bartender.

She started to taste it.

“Wait,” he said. The lime twist was still turning in a circle on the surface.

She waited.

“OK.”

She tasted her drink. “Wow,” she said.

“Yep.”

“What is it?”

“Manna.”

“Manna.”

“That’s what
manna
means,” he said. “In Hebrew.
Mannah. What is it.
”

He heard himself.
I’m trying to impress her,
he thought. It had been a while for that.

He came around the bar. “So, how smart are you?” he said.

“Pretty smart,” she said.

She tilted her head to one side a few degrees, a look that was meant to be friendly, open the door a little further, better than a smile. Her skin was perfect, her face full of light. He wondered why he’d thought she looked sad before.

“I’m just here on a day pass,” Jimmy said. “I know Joel.”

They both took sips of their drinks. She was about to say something when he said, “So, how many languages do you speak?”

“Three or four,” she said.

“English, French, Spanish, German . . .”

“English, French, Italian, German, a little Japanese. And I read Russian.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, “but do you know what you call that little thing on the tip of a shoelace, where it’s wrapped?”

“In English?” she said.

She was at least as good at this as he was. He smiled, waited.

“Yeah, English.”

“
Aglet,
” she said.

He touched his finger to the indentation below his nose, over the lip.

“OK, what’s this called, the little dent?”

“The
philtrum.
”

“And the little thing that hangs down at the back of your throat?”

“The
uvula.
”

“This is kind of exciting,” Jimmy said. “I had no idea.”

She touched the lower part of the opening into her ear, above the lobe. It was as pretty and as perfect, at least tonight, in this light, as the rest of her.

“The
intertragic notch,
” he answered. And then, “Why do they call it that?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

He offered his hand. “I’m Jimmy Miles.”

“I know,” she said.

But then, before the next line, before he found out how she knew who he was, there were two gunshots. There was a beat and then a third shot, all from an adjacent room, too loud for the house, wrong for the scene. Everyone jumped, a few people screamed, but unconvincingly. Others laughed.

And they all moved off to investigate.

Jimmy stayed at the bar. Jean followed the others.

She looked back at him. There was a moment and then he followed her.

In the blond-paneled study there were floor to ceiling books—leather-bound, color-coded, looted from some Old Money family or bankrupt junior college—club chairs and ottomans, green shade lights and ashtrays big as hubcaps, for the cigars. Joel Kinser liked to tell people it was his favorite room in the house. The body on the floor had an effective bloody chest wound, still spreading. She was a woman in her twenties, brown hair, tight low jeans, black Gap shoes, one of those skimpy, navel-baring tees the kids called “a wife beater.” If she was breathing it was very shallow. Here was another actor thinking this would do her some good. Her eyes were closed. She was cute dead.

Jimmy and Jean stepped in at the back of the crowd.

The man in the guayabera plopped down in the wingback chair directly over the body. He was an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

“Don’t touch anything, Ben,” a woman said.

“I wouldn’t think of it, Deborah,” JPL Ben said.

Joel was up front playing host. He stepped up onto the first rung of the library ladder.

“Well? Anyone?”

“She looks
dead,
” the TV comic said. They all laughed like it was the funniest thing.

“I talked to her,” a young man said. He was tall, red-haired, still in his teens. He wore corduroy shorts down over his knees, Birkenstocks with white socks, a T-shirt with a word on it that made no sense. He had a squat brown bottle of Bohemia by the throat, propped against his leg.

“What did she say?” the woman asked.

The young man hesitated.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” someone else said.

“What happened to the third shot?” Deborah said. “Give us
something
to start with, Joel.”

Kinser was enjoying himself more than he should have been. “I will tell you this,” he said. “She’s a screenwriter.”

“What’s her name?”

“Rosie Scenario,” the red-headed teenager said, very dry.

Ben bounded up out of the wingback chair. He had already made a discovery behind the couch, was just waiting to reveal it.

“So this would be her agent . . .”

The amateur sleuths gathered around the half-hidden second body, a young Latino in khakis and a white short-sleeved shirt, new running shoes on his feet, stage blood on his temple.

The gore was threatening to drip onto the off-white carpet. Joel lifted the lifeless head and put an
Architectural Digest
under it.

“What’s in his hand?” one of the women said.

Someone opened the dead fingers. A computer disk.

“
Datum!
” Ben said.

The air was mock electric.

Joel stepped up another rung. “OK, listen, everyone, tonight we have with us a
professional
investigator, my friend, Jimmy Miles.”

Everyone turned to look, but Jimmy was gone.

The cue ball struck the five ball, which clipped the eight, sending it into the side pocket.

“I meant to do that,” Jimmy said.

Jean had stepped in. It was the game room. They were alone. He retrieved the eight ball and lined up another shot.

She waited, expecting him to speak. He didn’t.

“We were hoping you might give us a fresh perspective,” she said. “Some original ideas.”

“The butler did it.”

“Joel said—”

Jimmy took his shot, sank the ball. “I used to have original ideas,” he said. “Then time and the world conspired to beat them out of me. Now I think the same thing as everybody else, only a little later.”

He was still trying to impress her. He sank the three. It made a nice click.

“Kantke,” Jimmy said. “Is that German?”

“Yes.”

“Nice to meet you.” He gave her a smile and offered her the cue.

She didn’t take it.

“I asked Joel to invite you,” she said.

In a beat, he changed, went cold, pulled inside. A familiar sadness overtook him, the way a cloud slides over the moon.

He went back to his game.

“I knew you and Joel were friends,” she said, as he closed down. “I’d like for you to look into something for me. Joel said—”

Jimmy sank a shot and cut her off. “I helped Joel with something a while back and he’s had the wrong idea about me ever since,” he said. “I gotta talk to him about that.”

“Please,” she said. “I know all about you.”

Now he gave her a challenging look.

“You only take cases every once in a while,” she said.

He waited. He wasn’t going to make it any easier for her.

“Nobody seems to know why you take the cases you take,” she said, putting one word after another. “Money doesn’t seem to be a factor—but I have money.”

He already knew that. And he knew that she was used to people listening to her, doing what she said.

He put the cue in the rack.

“Are you in business?” he said.

“I own a company.”

“I’m sure you know some investigators, security companies. There are some good ones.”

“This isn’t about my business,” she said. “It’s about something that happened a long time ago.”

Each one of the words of that second sentence came hard for her. But he still just looked at her and smiled and left her standing there.

A Mexican maid was watching a little TV on the counter in the kitchen. On screen was a school picture of a Latino boy ten or eleven, an image that has come to mean “missing child” or “dead boy.” The story was being told in Spanish. The picture of the boy gave way to a family crying in front of a little house, then an angle on a relative arriving, caught in the first moment he stepped from the car and got the news. On the L.A. Spanish stations the crime coverage was always more explicit, more theatrical, more frightening:
Monsters walk among us!
was the theme.

Jimmy came in. The maid tensed, but smiled. He opened a couple of cabinets until he found a glass. She watched as he filled it at the sink and drank it down.

She had a Band-Aid on her finger. He asked her about it. “
Te cortaste el dedo? Penso que era un
hot dog?”

She laughed and shook her head.

Then Jean came in.

She stopped under a bright recessed ceiling light, stood under its glare like a defendant in a sci-fi scene.